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Georgia’s new Governor, Brian Kemp, may want to send New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo a thank you note and a bushel basket of peaches.

That’s because another New York-based, firearms-related business has made the decision to expand its operations not in the Empire State with its highly restrictive gun control laws, but in this case in Georgia with its far friendlier business and political climate.

Check-Mate Industries, based in West Babylon, N.Y., makes handgun and rifle magazines, among other firearms-related equipment as well as life-saving devices for the medical industry. The company is an original equipment manufacturer for firearms makers and the U.S. military.

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I suppose they need one of each if the kid is ‘gender fluid’.

I am not making this up. I wish I were.

Steve Sailer says ‘told you so’.

The media’s latest Days of Rage, in which a white boy drove the national press into a frenzy by smiling at the leftist Person of Color banging a drum in his face, was like a greatest-hits collection of my old observations. So I’m going to take a victory lap to review how ideas I’ve been offering for years help explain much of the latest elite fury.

Kevin Williamson reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

David Klinghoffer scoffs at the notion of “passively allowing our views to be determined by others.” It has been a while, but, if memory serves, that is more or less how I learned algebra. Physics and chemistry, too.

Where we disagree is this: I do not believe that lawyers and novelists have anything of real value to contribute to our knowledge of evolution, and I have not seen any evidence that they do, however committed and well-intentioned these amateurs may be.

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So we’ve solved climate change and AlGore + dog will shut up about it, right?

Foolish mortal….

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There is no corner of life into which ‘vegans’ cannot intrude.

David Cole explores an interesting question.

The point is, there’s no shortage of writers who’ve envisioned a future in which sex, sexism, and other gender-related issues continue to exist.

But you know what’s conspicuously missing from the dystopia genre? Race. No one likes to write stories of a future world in which race is still a thing. Why? Why is it easy to believe that the battle of the sexes will continue after a nuclear war or a devastating plague, but racial tensions will somehow vanish? It’s the Lathe of Heavenprinciple, the belief that in the future we’ll still have every current social ill except racism (in The Lathe of Heaven, author Ursula Le Guin presents an ashy future in which all humans have become the color gray).

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Now, imagine what would have happened had this incident occurred in California or Florida.

The Other McCain comments: Advice to Criminals: Avoid Texas

I’m a big fan of flatness, myself.

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After one look at the author, I can see why.

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Community Thrift is a second-hand staple in San Francisco, a spot consistently mobbed with shoppers and donators alike, employees say. For the past week, though, the mob of people armed with donation bags has grown. By a lot.

Another weird thing has been happening, says Susan, who works the front desk: People have been thanking their objects before giving them away. She rolls her eyes.

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Let’s hear it for government shutdowns.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Leave bicycles to the young and stupid.

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Why? They don’t say. They just expect you to obey orders.

John Hinderaker at Powerline as a great idea.

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One would think that eventually you would get tired of the taste of vegans.

Ketchup can only do so much.

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he entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work.

Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press.

The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.

Eric S. Raymond is not happy.

The first thing to know is this: with only rare exceptions, any Western swordfighting you see in older movies is going to be seriously anachronistic. It’s almost all derived from French high-line fencing, which is also the basis for Olympic sport fencing. French high-line is a very late style, not actually fully developed until early 1800s, that is adapted for very light thrusting weapons. These are not at all typical of the swords in use over most of recorded history.

In particular, the real-life inspirations for the Three Musketeers, in the 1620s, didn’t fight anything like their movie versions. They used rapiers – thrusting swords – all right, but their weapons were quite a bit longer and heavier than a 19th-century smallsword. Correspondingly, the tempo of a fight had to be slower, with more pauses as the fighters watched for an opening (a weakness in stance or balance, or a momentary loss of concentration). Normal guard position was lower and covered more of center line, not the point-it-straight-at-you of high line. You find all this out pretty quickly if you actually train with these weapons.

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The imagery coming out of the White House has reached the media and Trump’s largest critics (I’m being redundant), who have harangued him for what they consider a pathetic display of congratulation, but I don’t know what could make the image more American. The context itself is even patently, on-brand American: College football players, anticipating dining with the president at the White House after they won a national championship during the longest government shutdown in American history; the billionaire-turned-president wearing his staple red power tie, paying for the fast food on his own dime.

McDonald’s is cheap, fast, and satisfying (even if the satisfaction is only emphemeral). The obsession with automation and convenience is an American one, and our food reflects this. When I have an intense food craving, it’s not duck confit or cassoulet that I want — it’s the addictive, guilt-inducing soul food that only an employee behind a drive-through window can give me. Big Macs and Whoppers are immediately accessible food for the working class, and Trump knows this — he could’ve easily afforded to purchase roasted russet potatoes and salmon, followed by other upscale-dinner norms of petite desserts with fancy coulis designs. He could’ve afforded a reception with rotating waiters holding glistening trays of hors d’oeuvres.

But he didn’t. He chose “great American food.”

At last, a writer at National Review who understands the dialectic. I suggest that Marlo will soon be looking for another job.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline is not afraid to ask the obvious question.

en. Kirsten Gillibrand is expected to enter the presidential race today. Reportedly, she will make the announcement on Stephen Colbert’s program, and then head to Iowa to campaign.

When the Democratic field is set, Gillibrand will likely be its second phoniest member, trailing only Sen. Cory Booker. In itself, phoniness is not necessarily a drawback. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards both made the national ticket.

The real problem for Gillibrand is the presence of her female Senate colleagues, Elizabeth Warren and (presumably) Kamala Harris, in the 2020 field. What will be Gillibrand’s case for preferring her to them?

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I have no response to that.

You’d think that the reference to Kilimanjaro would make Kenya a more appropriate venue, but I guess not.

Ace of Spades does some color commentary.

Trump’s responses to Red Cortez’s “Racisss!!” taunt, and Sassy Jim Acosta’s buffoonish grandstanding, should be primers for all serious Republican politicians in the future.

Don’t dignify fundamentally undignified people. Treat them as what they actually are, not as what they pretend to be.

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Cronyism is alive and well in the Democrat Party.

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A California judge has ruled that American cops can’t force people to unlock a mobile phone with their face or finger. The ruling goes further to protect people’s private lives from government searches than any before and is being hailed as a potentially landmark decision.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Now THAT’S comedy.

The chief difference (functionally) between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats never forget what side they are on, whereas a lot of Republicans often lose track — or never knew in the first place.

Read it. And scope out the reading list.

f you pay much attention to the posturings of the left — and how could you not? — you probably have concluded that leftism is a quasi-religious* cult.

Leftism, as we know it today, is quasi-religious because of its strongly moralistic bent, given its readiness to condemn anything that can be associated (by leftists) with white supremacy/white privilege/racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, climate-change denialism, elitism, etc., etc., etc. (Condemnation of elitism, coming from leftist elites, epitomizes irony.)

Leftism of yore was aimed mainly at the realization of a material heaven on Earth through communism, socialism, and various forms of income and wealth redistribution. Today’s leftism, without having abandoned the objective of economic equality (or less inequality), has conjoined that objective to social equality.

Wes McKinney makes a good case for it.

One thing is certain: many companies based in major cities like NYC and SF are extremely effective at extracting high quality labor from the world’s most talented young people. It should be no surprise why wealthy corporations want this to be: it is immensely profitable. In a single quarter in 2017, Facebook made around $450,000 in revenue and $190,000 in profit per employee. As Jeff Hammerbacher infamously put it: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

I’ve increasingly felt that open source development is at odds with the values that are driving a large portion of the corporate world, particularly in the United States. Many companies won’t fund open source work because there is no “return on investment”. This is deeply frustrating, and being surrounded by people whose actions align with profit-motive can be pretty discouraging. It’s not necessarily that people who work in NYC or SF are greedy or amorally concerned with making money. In many cases they are just responding to incentives coming from pretty low on the hierarchy of needs.

Lileks.

It’s the middle of the month of the new year, and you haven’t reduced your screen time, learned French, lost weight, organized the drawers or anything else you resolved to do. January sits on your chest like a fat, dead possum.

But you know what they say about possums: They only play dead. So embrace the good news — you have a live, nasty possum on your chest.

Let me rework that metaphor. You have plenty of chances to start something new, and it’s just a two-step process. Step 1, slowly roll over, so the possum slides off. Two, look at that glossy community education catalog that arrived in the mail. It’s full of interesting classes. It’s like college, without the crippling debt and early-20s sense of existential despair.

I have lingered over these details because they formed a part–a most important and honorable part–of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, was so soon to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated; young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education.

— Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Mrs. Wharton died in 1935; there is no telling what her reaction would have been to Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex, but I doubt that it would have been good.

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This is a good example of what Scott Adams calls ‘talking past the sale’. If somebody gets in your face and shouts ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT INCOME INEQUALITY?’ the automatic response of most people is to start fumbling around trying to think of what it is you’re doing about income inequality as if it were obvious that income inequality were ipso facto some bad thing that needs to be fixed.

The correct response, of course, is to ask the shouter ‘Why should I be doing something about income inequality?’ since (a) you didn’t create it and (b) no demonstration has been made that it’s a bad thing. But that’s the way the Usual Suspects deal with their agenda: They just proceed on the assumption that their grievances are fully justified and therefore the discussion (using the term loosely) is about how to satisfy them.

There is a lot of income inequality between me and Bill Gates, because I didn’t see an opportunity in the computer field when I was in college, as he did, and I didn’t drop out of Harvard, as he did, to pursue it by working sixty-hour weeks for twenty years, as he did, to build a company to take advantage of that. Is that his fault, or mine? Or maybe nobody’s? In any event, I don’t see that I have any legitimate beef that he’s one of the top ten richest people in the world and I’m not.

Democrats, of course, don’t see it that way. Since there’s no way yet to make me clever and workaholic, their solution is to steal most of his money (thus ensuring that his decades of cleverness and hard work gained him very little) and give it — not to me, of course, because I’m a white man, but to some prole who can barely use a computer much less create an industry to provide them for everybody. As one can plainly see, this guarantees that in the future we will have a lot more ignorant proles and a lot less clever hard-working people like Bill Gates.

But those whose wealth and power depend on harvesting the votes of the ignorant proles (and, hardest to comprehend, the contributions of people like Bill Gates) don’t worry about that, because no matter how bad it is for the rest of us, they’ll be doing very well indeed, as will their children. (Yeah, Chelsea, I’m looking at YOU.)

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Compromise. It’s a word President Trump used several times yesterday. He is open to compromise. In this case, that means something short of the $5 billion he wants for a border wall. He’s open to taking less, perhaps in exchange for not applying the law to younger illegal immigrants. This is clearly the easiest way out of the current debacle. But it is something the Democrats, led by “No Wall” Nancy Pelosi, have said they will never support.

This is a problem. Democrats have backed themselves up against a, well, a wall. They have created a situation in which if they give even one dollar to Trump to build a wall, or fence, steel barrier, or whatever, they have lost the political fight. Pelosi, the great speaker of the House who gets things done, has left herself no leverage to get anything done. She could ask for almost anything in exchange for wall funding, but instead, she won’t budge.

The Democrats will lose because they have an infinite many ways to lose and only one way to win, one that Trump will never give them.

The Democrats have made this a zero-sum game. If Trump gets any money for the wall, he wins. That’s a really fantastic position for him. He can go on TV, whether in a controversial network roadblock or an appearance on the southern border, and say, “Hey, I’m up for a compromise.” Meanwhile, Chuck and Nancy have to slam the door shut on getting 800,000 federal employees back to work.

I’ve met rocks with more brains than Nancy Pelosi.

Fee Fi Fo Fum! I smell the blood of an English major!

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Our study used a sample of 175 students from two universities (one in south Wales, the other in Cyprus). We found that people with light or blue eyes scored significantly lower on the seasonal pattern assessment questionnaire than those with dark or brown eyes. These results agree with previous research that found brown or dark-eyed people were significantly more depressed than those with blue eyes.

Hey, we Ice People were made for winter. WETSU.

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Newly-inaugurated Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has made good on his promise to withdraw from the UN’s “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration”.

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I suspect he’s got a large pool from which to choose.